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"I hear you, but think about it. Your body has been learning new responses all month. The sleep. The calls. The things you've let yourself feel. Your nervous system is not the same system it was on October 17. You've been rewriting it."

"You've been rewriting it," I say. The correction is automatic.

The silence is loud before he chuckles.

"Maybe," he says. "But you let me."

He’s right. I let him. I let his voice into the dark. I let his words rearrange my sleep, my evenings, my body's relationship to midnight. I let him tell me to take a pill. I let him tell me to touch myself. I let him explain the soreness I woke up with, the dream I couldn't decode.

I let him into every room and he stayed.

"Same time tomorrow?"

"Same time tomorrow. Milo?"

"Yeah?"

"You're going to be okay."

The call ends at 1:38 a.m. and I’m so mentally exhausted I’m ready to go to bed.

Trazodone. Water. Bed. Bean on my shins. The ceiling blurring. My body heavy, loose, the muscles going slack.

His voice in my head. The brown eyes in my mind. Two men occupying the same space behind my eyelids, the voice and the face, and sleep coming from both directions at once, closing over me and all I feel is relief.

Peace.

The last thought before the trazodone takes me is not about Halloween. Not about the decorations, the fog machine, the skeleton on Ellis's lawn. The last thought is about a man at an outdoor table saying I'll be here with the same certainty Brantley says same time tomorrow, and the wish, impossible, irrational, that I could open my door on Halloween night and find them both. Find them combined. One man with brown eyes and a voice I'd recognize in the dark.

The thought dissolves. The sleep pulls me under. Bean's nose is on my ankle. The dark is the dark, and his voice is in it, and for now that's enough.

Chapter Fourteen: Brantley

The notebook is closed.

Every line memorized, everything that could possible go wrong accounted for. The plan that started in ink on unlined pages is now a thing that lives in my hands, my mouth, the muscles in my legs that will carry me from the car to his door. Days of phone calls, coffee shop encounters, a lock pick turning in the dark. All of it funneling into tonight.

October 31. 10:47 p.m.

The street is quiet. The trick-or-treaters finished hours ago. The last of them, a pack of teenagers in cheap masks, passed this block around 8:30. Now the decorations are performing for nobody. Ellis's skeleton triggers for a cat crossing the yard. The fog machine on the Petersons' sidewalk hisses into empty air. The skeleton sways in the wind above a lawn scattered with candy wrappers.

His building is at the end of the block. Second floor. The window is dark. The lights are off. He's inside, in the dark, the way he told me he spent last Halloween, sitting on the floor with Bean, waiting for midnight, waiting for the night to end.

This year the night doesn't end the same way.

I took tonight off, my first night off since Anders handed me his rotation. My car is parked two blocks over, and the walk takes four minutes. Black jacket, dark jeans, boots. No costume. Every person who came to his door tonight was wearing something over their face. When he opens the door and sees a face with nothing on it, nothing hiding it, the relief will land before the recognition.

Then the recognition.

If he doesn’t open the door, I will open it for him.

The lobby door is unlocked. It always is. The stairs inside are carpeted, but the landing creaks, and I take it slow. The sound carries in the quiet. If he's listening, and he's always listening, he'll hear the footsteps. One person. Steady pace. No costume accessories clicking or dragging. Just boots on the stairs.

His door. The deadbolt is engaged and the handle lock is set. Bean's nails on the floor behind the door, moving toward the sound. She doesn't bark. Bean knows my scent. Noted at the coffee shop, confirmed the night I stepped through this doorway. For Bean, the person on the other side of this door is already approved.

I knock three times, knuckles on wood. Not the doorbell. The doorbell is what trick-or-treaters use. A knock is personal. A knock says the person on the other side is asking, not demanding.

Five seconds of silence. Ten. A whimper from Bean, not a bark.